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Comment by ge96 | Hacker News Reader

Damn, amazing that bathroom render, hard to tell it's not real (photo)

I think it's to the point now where the method of render isn't as critical -- many are capable of photoreal renders, but subtle details, like the way objects settle, or how rooms that are actually lived in are worn.

Bonus: I thought to compare the sterility of the bathroom pictured to an IKEA catalog, and thus looked one up. I couldn't tell whether the pictures were CGI or photographed, and did a little digging -- apparently 75%~ of IKEA's catalog is CGI.

I've made the observation previously that it's harder to tell the difference between CGI and Fake Actual than between CGI and Real.

The examples I gave previously are movies. The CGI of a bedroom in a movie doesn't look noticeably more fake _because_ all the actual "bedrooms" in movies are sets built by carpenters a few hours before filming. The "actual" bedroom lacks all the details of a real bedroom, so it doesn't surprise us when a CGI one does in a movie.

It's interesting to compare Dogme 95 films, a movie made strictly to those rules is using real spaces not sets - among many other constraints, and so it looks more "real". Of course you can't make Iron Man 2 or The Fast and the Furious this way, but a lot of other stuff _could_ be done under these rules if we wanted it to look like the real world.

Yeah. I think I like the sRGB version of it more though...

It's not about "realism" or even style, it's more about preserving detail in extreme contrast. All pixels brighter than a certain threshold become white and since there's nothing whiter than white, they're all the same with information lost. This is basically HDR (no idea why the "Filmic Color Management" phrase is necessary), as it has been common, even in real-time rendering and digital photography for years. I suppose they implemented it in a smarter way? The basic idea is to expose at different levels and combine the parts that preserve the most detail.

I think it's called Filmic Color Management because of this:

"... imitate an effect that's unique to film: as exposure increases, colors will become more and more desaturated."

https://www.blenderguru.com/tutorials/secret-ingredient-phot...

Whereas in many HDR algorithms, there is no such thing going on.

For rendered images, you don't need to expose different levels, as a single render done in 32 bit floating point usually contains enough information to cover the visible dynamic range (and beyond). The improvement in Blender 2.79 is that it includes new transformations from the render color space to the display space.

"Filmic" is just a name that has been in use lately to emphasise when such transformations mimic the behaviour of film, as opposed to for example tone mapping operators that mimic the behaviour of the human eye.

I don't know why they chose that scene, these ones show the difference much more: https://www.blenderguru.com/tutorials/secret-ingredient-phot...

The sRGB image might look punchier at first, but once you start looking closer you'll see it's blown out and the colours are wrong. It's like putting 10 spoonfuls of sugar in your coffee.

The real advantage of using HDR or Filmic, is that details start to show in areas with low contrast. Try looking at the window on the right or around the faucets. The higher contrast means more details are visible.

In my opinion the point is that the artist gets now better control over the end result. I think with minor parameter tweaks you could get a pretty high-contrast scene too. Also even the high-contrast render probably will look more realistic now.

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